Category scrapplings

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Summary: Everyone in the Tiadun Keep is dragon-blind, even the priestesses. Darna pretends she can’t see the realm’s guardian dragon either – she already gets teased enough for her limp. She flees to the legendary city of Anamat, where some still see the dragons, or so the minstrels say.

On her journey, she meets Myril, an older scrappling girl with an eerie sense of hearing and frequent premonitions. Together, they hope to find their places in the city.

Then there’s Iola, who actually wants to be a priestess. She’s so dragon-struck that she can’t see through the temples’ thin veils of piety, can’t see the priestesses’ greed as they fleece their sweaty devotees.

Thorat is Iola’s champion. He sees dragons as much as the girls do, but unlike them he’s very good at blending in with normal boys. Darna wishes he would notice her sometimes, too.

In the city, Darna strikes out on her own to find secret passageways. She scavenges for valuable scraps to sell. If she can’t buy a guild apprenticeship by Midsummer, she’ll be exiled from the city, unless the priestesses take her, which is the last thing she wants. So when she’s offered a sack full of gold beads for a small bit of thieving, she takes her chances… and ends up angering the dragon herself.

Thoughts: I had a good feeling about this book when I first read the synopsis, months back when it arrived as part of my SPFBO package. It sounded like it had a lot of potential to be really enjoyable, and while the world at first seemed a bit generic, well, it’s not like I haven’t read and enjoyed books set in generic fantasy worlds in the past.

As it turns out, the worldbuilding was actually one of the things I liked best about Scrapplings. On the surface it looks a bit generic. There are dragons. A country with ties to them, and a fear of foreigners who have less to do with dragons. Urchins in the street, priestesses in their temples. Nothing outstanding. But those are just the bare bones, the scaffolding that holds it all together and supports the artistry on the surface. Dragons are creatures of myth, who both made the world and are the world, and they’re more spiritual beings than corporeal ones. Priestesses devoted to dragons are akin to what we’d think of as temple prostitutes, engaging in sexual acts as a spiritual thing, representing a communion with dragons. Or that’s the theory, anyway, since many priestesses seem to have more belief in the sex than they do in dragons, or what their positions are supposed to represent. Dragons are invisible to most, and those who see them often go on to become priestesses, rather as a default position.

Darna is a girl who can see dragons but has no interest in becoming a priestess. She also seems to be the illegitimate child of a prince and a priestess, though for most of her life she’s been treated as a servant, and stigma against her and her disability hold her back from following her dreams. Iola was cast out from her family, dreams of traveling to the city of Anamat to become a priestess, and can’t understand why Darna would want anything else. Thorat is a fairly generic boy who travelled with Iola on her journey, who sees dragons far less than the rest of them but still sees them. And then there’s Myril, who seems even less distinguished than Thorat, but who can also see dragons and is on her way to Anamat too.

The main characters are a bit peculiar in that they have an interesting dynamic while largely remaining pretty uninteresting people. They remained acquaintances rather than friends, each following their own path as the story went along but always gravitating back to each other in the end. So that was an interesting twist on what you usually see in YA-oriented stuff; most often people thrown together by circumstance either become friends or enemies, but rarely do they keep a similar dynamic to when they started. Most of the characters, though, weren’t particularly interesting. Darna most certainly was, since she showed initiative and ended up in the thick of conflict and larger plots and the real meat of the story. Iola was, to a degree, since she seemed most connected to the dragons. But Thorat seemed to be there to provide a couple of perspective breaks and participate in a scheme toward the end of the book, and Myril didn’t really contribute to the story at all. Elna, a secondary character who shows up halfway through the book and whose purpose is really just to be another member of Darna’s small street gang, got more development than Myril did.

Stylistically, I rather enjoyed Scrapplings. The beginning was a bit awkward, and I thought the first chapter could have been cut entirely without anything really being missed from the story (at least not that couldn’t have been filled in by flashbacks similar to what other characters got as their introduction, or dropping explanations throughout the rest of the text), but for the most part, it was pretty good. Scrapplings is one of those books where surprisingly little happens, but you don’t realise it until you’ve already gotten invested in the world and the story. I’m a bit odd in that sometimes I really like reading about the day-to-day lives of some characters, so the amount of window-dressing in this story didn’t bother me as much as it might bother those who prefer a very tight story with no words wasted. But the worldbuilding and the writing style were good, even if the pacing wasn’t fantastic.

So it’s a book not without its issues, but it was still very enjoyable, and it interested me enough to make me curious about reading future installments of the series. It’s a light read, not heavy on action or tension, and in some ways it feels more like the first half of a book rather than a full book itself, but that doesn’t by default make it a bad book. (Nor do I count that as a flaw that only arose due to the book’s self-published status, given that I recently read a traditionally-published novel by a big-name author that made me think the exact same thing.) Categorically, I think I might put this book somewhere between mid-grade and YA, given the combination of the ages of the characters, aspects of the writing style, and some of the novel’s content, and while mid-grade isn’t exactly my speciality, I do know what I like, and I liked Scrapplings. Once you get past the awkward beginning, the story really starts to shine through, and I can see a fair bit of potential for the rest of this series.

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Rating System

Fantastic book, loved reading it, definitely recommended
Very enjoyable, a few issues but still well worth reading
Decent, problems detracted from enjoyment somewhat, but still worth giving a try
Some serious issues, was a struggle to read, not worth keeping around
I'm sorry I wasted my time on this...

Disclaimer

Any books received by the publisher or author for review will be noted as such. Any books without this notification are owned by me or were borrowed from friends or the library. All reviews here are my honest opinion, uninfluenced by the manner in which I obtained the book, and no money was provided in exchange for me writing said reviews.